DOHA: An increasing number of expatriates eligible to apply for a family visa say the biggest hurdle they face is producing a municipality-attested copy of their house rent contract.
The above document is hard to get, say expatriates, explaining that a rent contract must first be registered with the municipality of the area concerned for it to be attested.
And for the registration, the landlord of the rented house must approach the municipality with ownership documents and, on top of it, pay at least one per cent of the annual rent as registration fee.
The Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning says a rent contract that is not registered with a municipality is not to be attested at any cost. “Surely, we don’t attest a rent agreement if it is not registered with a municipality,” confirmed a senior ministry official.
“A registered rent agreement is a legal document, and only then can we attest it,” Mohamed Al Fuhaid, assistant legal advisor at the ministry, told The Peninsula yesterday.
An attested rent contract is one of the 11 documents the immigration department demands from an expatriate applying for residency visas for his wife and children.
However, due to rising house rents and a shortage of affordable residential units, not many expatriates in middle-income jobs who have the minimum salary of QR10,000 to be eligible for a family visa get independent accommodation.
Rents of independent residential units normally begin from QR4,500, and have of late been going up, so most such expatriates prefer to stay in sublet accommodation in large apartments or partitioned villas.
“How do we get separate housing if our gross monthly pay packet is just QR10,000 or even QR11,000?,” asks an expatriate who yesterday collected a list of documents to be produced with his residency visa application for his wife and one child.
He said he lived in a small unit carved out of a big villa in Abu Hamour and paid a rent of QR2,800. “My salary is just QR10,000, so I can hardly afford to take an independent apartment on rent. That would cost me half my salary,” said the expatriate.
Subletting homes is illegal, said Al Fuhaid, adding that the ministry can initiate legal action against violators if there are specific complaints or suspicions. So the question of municipal attestation doesn’t arise for such tenants.
Such attestation is normally required for Qatari government employees living in rented accommodation so they can claim a housing allowance, said Al Fuhaid.
Or, one needs an attested rent contract when taking a dispute with a tenant or landlord to a civic rent dispute resolution committee.
THE PENINSULA
